"I Chased Down My Identity Thief"

Karen Lodrick stood in line at the Starbucks not far from the corner of Church and Market streets in San Francisco, every inch of her body in high stress mode. Her heart was thumping; her cheeks were on fire; the knot in her gut was thick and tight. That's her, she thought. That has to be her. Less than 12 inches away from Lodrick was a tall, robust woman with a shock of dark, wavy hair, her eyes hidden behind an enormous pair of Gucci sunglasses.

"My stomach felt like it was dropping out of my body," says Lodrick, a 41-year-old freelance Web consultant. "This was the woman who had been stealing my identity—and there was no way I was letting her out of my sight."

Five months earlier, on Saturday, November 25, 2006, Lodrick had returned to her San Francisco apartment after spending Thanksgiving with her family in Michigan to find an automated message on her voice mail. "Ms. Lodrick, this is a courtesy call from Wells Fargo," the voice said. "We're checking to make sure you made several large withdrawals from your account in the last few days."

Lodrick was a careful spender, someone who paid her bills on time and kept careful watch over her cash flow, so if she had taken money out of her account, she would have remembered—and would have had the receipts to prove it. She hadn't been to the ATM since before her trip, so she knew there must be some mistake.

Things grew even weirder when she dialed the bank's toll-free number and got a representative on the phone. Lodrick learned that she had supposedly withdrawn a total of $2,400 from an ATM that weekend. She asked the agent to verify her card number. "That's not my card!" Lodrick said after hearing the unfamiliar digits. "How can this debit card be running around with my name on it?" The agent explained: In order for the bank to assign a second card to her name, Lodrick—or someone posing as Lodrick—would have had to apply for it, and the card would have been sent to her home address. "Does anyone have access to your mail?" the agent asked. "No," Lodrick said as the panic rose in her throat. She lived alone. Shaken, she canceled the fraudulent card. Then, after hanging up, she searched her apartment and her mailbox for signs of a break-in: nothing.

Lodrick didn't sleep well that night. On Monday morning, hollow-eyed, she went to her bank, where a customer service rep showed her a laundry list of transactions—$250 at Safeway, $600 at a jeweler, $2,000 at Macy's—none of which Lodrick recognized. Her heart sank. And then came the real shocker: The thief had acquired two debit cards in Lodrick's name and had used them to clear out the entire $7,200 in her checking account, leaving her $1,200 overdrawn. With the exception of a small savings account ("I'm the kind of person who never touches her savings," she says), it was all the money Lodrick had in the world. She immediately called the bank's fraud department and went to the police station to file a report. Along the way, she did her best not to freak out. "I thought, OK, Karen. Stay calm," she says. "I've always been an it's all good' kind of person, so I tried to have the same attitude about this, but I was also thinking, I will figure this out because I have to. My rent was due."

Getting the money back

For the next two weeks, Lodrick put her normally full calendar on hold. She stopped going to the gym, canceled dinners with friends and turned down work. Instead she focused her energies on clearing her name. In order to recover the stolen money, Lodrick had to dispute more than 100 fraudulent charges. She spent hours on the phone, working her way through countless automated systems. "I heard the phrase For service in English, press one' in my sleep," Lodrick says. "Friends would ask me to join them for a drink, but I couldn't pull myself away. My whole life was about this."

Lodrick's landlord gave her a grace period on her rent, but the utility companies were less forgiving, so bills went unpaid; late fees piled up. Her normally sparkling house started to gather clutter and dust. Two weeks earlier she'd been a woman with a career and an apartment she loved. Now she was living like a hermit, spending all her time trying to reclaim her identity.

By mid-December the phone calls and the affidavits did the trick, and all the money was reinstated to Lodrick's account. She paid her bills—late—and relaxed a bit. But she couldn't shake the worry that clouded her days: She still didn't know who had made her life such a living hell. She asked her mailman if he'd noticed anything funny. "He said that he was finding mail all over the place in the neighborhood—in doorways, on the floor—as if the boxes had been looted," Lodrick says. If that's the case, she thought, why wasn't anyone doing something about it? When she called the post office about her compromised mail, the person she spoke with didn't seem surprised. "They seemed to know that mail was being stolen in my area," Lodrick says. "But when I asked why no one had been alerted, the inspector said he couldn't talk about it because it was under investigation." (A U.S. Postal Service official told Glamour the case is still being investigated.) Lodrick switched to a P.O. box.

When Lodrick called the police with this new development, their response was just as frustrating. She says they told her that they didn't expect to find her thief—and that nonviolent crimes were not their top priority.

And then came a break. Three weeks after Thanksgiving, Wells Fargo called: Their fraud unit had been going through the tapes shot by security cameras at all their ATMs and found footage of someone using Lodrick's account. Did she want to see them?

In a cramped room at the bank, Lodrick squinted at a series of grainy stills and saw a fuzzy image of a woman around her age, but taller and heavier, with dark wavy hair, wearing a fur-trimmed coat and big sunglasses. "I broke down," says Lodrick. "I thought, That's the face of this crime. I was so mad, I cried."

Despite this new development, the mystery woman remained at large. The pictures of the "other" Karen haunted Lodrick. She knew her thief was out there, wandering the streets of San Francisco. Every once in a while, she'd spot a fur-trimmed coat in the crowd and wonder if it might be her. It never was. By February, though, Lodrick was feeling almost back to normal. True, she was still devoting Fridays to cleaning up her credit mess. But she was confident that she'd done everything she could to fraudproof her life. All of the credit bureaus had her on their watch lists, she had a new ATM card and she'd asked the bank and every company she did business with to request a password each time she accessed her accounts.

Then in early April 2007, a mysterious $1,600 charge appeared on her Macy's bill. A few days later $600 was withdrawn from her new checking account. Frustrated that her safety measures were not working, Lodrick took the day off from work, planted herself at the bank and swore not to leave until they could guarantee her money's safety. The bank installed yet another password-protected alert on her accounts. "I thought to myself, This is not going to be OK. It's never going to end. I had better get used to this," she says.

Three days later she got a phone call from her bank. "Ms. Lodrick," the teller said, "are you going to come back for your driver's license?"

Lodrick looked in her wallet. "I have my license," she said. "And I haven't been to the bank today."

The teller related that the strangest thing had just happened—a woman calling herself Karen Lodrick had come in to open a new account. When the teller requested a password, the woman got flustered. "I'll be right back," she'd said—and departed quickly, leaving her driver's license behind. Lodrick's dread turned to hope. "Don't give it back!" she said. "That woman has been stealing my identity!"

A very lucky break

The next morning Lodrick headed to the bank to grab the license and take it to the police. In her excitement, she got there an hour before it opened. You're too keyed up, Lodrick thought. Just go to the Starbucks, get a coffee and relax. She walked next door and queued up. Behind her in line stood a familiar-looking woman wearing a fur-trimmed coat and Gucci sunglasses.

As her stomach tightened into a knot, she walked out of earshot and called the cops. "My name is Karen Lodrick and I've been dealing with identity theft," she said. "I'm sitting in a Starbucks, and I think the thief is right here." The police said they were on their way. All Lodrick had to do was watch and wait.

But after several minutes the woman in the sunglasses stood up from her table and headed out the door. Lodrick started to panic: She's leaving! I am going to lose her! In a split second, she made up her mind to do something she never thought she could—she followed the woman, walking as quickly but inconspicuously as possible. About half a block into her pursuit, she called 911.

"Where are you?" the 911 operator asked.

Lodrick glanced around for a street sign. "I don't know," she said. She looked up, and the woman was gone. Oh no, Lodrick thought. I lost her. But she kept walking. "This was my one chance. I wanted my life back. I was scared, but I was more afraid of having her out of my sight than I was of following her." Apparently the woman realized she was being shadowed, because Lodrick soon found her hiding in a doorway. Upon seeing her pursuer, the woman started running. So did Lodrick.

It was a ridiculous scene, and Lodrick knew it. But she kept going. Just 5'2" and 110 pounds, in flip-flops, still clutching her latte, cell phone glued to her ear, Lodrick ran after the much taller woman for two and a half city blocks. When they hit Market Street, a busy thoroughfare, the woman hailed a cab, but Lodrick ran up to the driver and yelled, "Don't drive away! This woman stole my identity! I've got 911 on the phone—they are on their way." The woman stared at her, stunned. The cab driver lifted his hands off the wheel. "You're scaring me," the woman said as she jumped out of the cab. "Stop following me!"

"I'm really scared too!" Lodrick called after her. "Can you just wait for the police to come? I'll apologize if I'm wrong."

The woman took off again, tossing a black pouch into an empty grocery cart on her way. "She dropped something," Lodrick told the 911 operator, bending down to pick it up. "It's a Prada wallet!"

Wallet in hand, Lodrick kept running. Across Market Street, the woman hopped onto a parked streetcar. Lodrick rushed up to the driver and begged him not to start the vehicle—and the woman jumped off. "Just stop!" Lodrick begged. "I can't!" the woman said. "I'm on probation!" Then she ran back across Market.

When are the police going to get here? Lodrick thought. She followed the woman off Market, onto Franklin Street and around a corner—and saw no one.

"I lost her," Lodrick said to the 911 operator. She opened the wallet. Inside were several cards and various papers. Tears sprang to her eyes. "Everything has my name on it!" she told the operator. "Here's my bank statement! My debit card!"

A few minutes later a policeman arrived. "She's gone," Lodrick said, her chest still heaving from the chase through the hilly San Francisco streets. "I'll take a look around," the policeman said, walking into a nearby parking garage. "You wait here."

The cop checked the garage while Lodrick caught her breath. After a few minutes he found the thief, crouched behind a car and smoking a cigarette.

As the policeman handcuffed the woman, the reality of what she'd done—chased down a potentially dangerous criminal—hit Lodrick. I can't believe I did that! she thought. The policeman began to lead the suspect away, and Lodrick made eye contact with her for the first time. "You should have kept running," Lodrick said.

Unmasking the other Karen Lodrick

At the police station, Lodrick learned a few things about her doppelganger: Her real name was Maria Nelson. She was 31 and had a record of 75 prior felony arrests—for burglary, drugs and identity fraud—as well as a methamphetamine and heroin habit. "I thought, Wow. Not only have I been buying this woman clothes, but I've probably been buying her drugs, too," Lodrick says.

The district attorney told Lodrick that Nelson had specifically been targeting her, although he didn't say why, and knew many things about her, including where she lived. In fact, they were practically neighbors—the two women had apartments less than a mile apart. Lodrick believes that Nelson broke into her mailbox several times, to steal the ATM card she'd ordered and the letter that included the PIN number. She also guessed that over the course of several months, Nelson had stolen bank statements, a certificate of deposit receipt with Lodrick's social security number and a paycheck for $8,000 (Lodrick hadn't missed it, because the check had arrived earlier than she'd anticipated).

Nelson was charged with fraudulently using another person's identity and jailed for 44 days before her arraignment. Her public defender arranged for her to plead guilty, and she was sentenced to only the 44 days already served, plus three years probation. Maria Nelson was released as soon as the hearing was over.

The minimal sentence rocked Lodrick to her bones. "I couldn't believe it," she says. "I worked so hard to get my identity back. Six months of my life was completely ruined. I'm still dealing with it. I went out and caught this woman myself—literally ran her down in the street—and they just slapped her wrist and sent her off to do it to someone else!"

Although Lodrick couldn't get what she felt was justice, she might still get compensation. "I lost money because I took time off to clear my credit," she says. "I'm going to get it back." California is a restitution state, which means that victims of certain crimes are allowed to seek monetary damages. Lodrick's restitution hearing was scheduled to be held on October 19, and at press time, she was planning to ask for the money Nelson took, plus money lost in wages and late fees, as well as money for pain and suffering. The total amount of the claim: $72,000.

Lodrick has also started a website, fightingbacknow.com, to help other victims of identity theft. Despite her frustrations with the justice system, she's found her last year's experience to be a not altogether bad one. "Before this, if someone had walked up to me and said that I look like the kind of woman who would chase her own thief down a crowded San Francisco street, I never would have believed it," she says. "But you know what? It turns out that I am that kind of woman—which, when you think about it, is kind of awesome."